API Strategy & Practice Conference 2017

People often tend to think of Asterisk as an "open source PBX" because that was the focus of the original development effort. But calling Asterisk a PBX is both selling it short (it is much more) and overstating it (it can be much less). Asterisk is to communications applications what the Apache web server is to web applications. Apache is a web server. Asterisk is a communication server. When you install Asterisk, you have a communications server but it is up to you to create the communications applications.

The Asterisk RESTFul Interface (ARI) is an asynchronous API that allows developers to build communications applications by exposing the raw primitive objects in Asterisk - channels, bridges, endpoints, media, etc. The state of the objects being controlled by the user are conveyed via JSON events over a WebSocket. These resources were traditionally the purview of Asterisk's C modules. By handing control of these resources via ARI to all developers regardless of their language choice Asterisk has become an engine of communication, with the business logic of how things should communicate deferred to the application using Asterisk.

This presentation will provide information on getting started using ARI and will provide a working demonstration of using the ARI to create a telephone application.